AllMovie

This half-hour video presents a series of conversations with author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991). Singer speaks regarding his life, his influences, his art, his philosophy, and his love of Yiddish, a dialect of High German once spoken by many European Jews. Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet and features elements of Hebrew, Russian, and Polish. The son of an Hasidic Jewish rabbi, Singer grew up in the ghetto of pre-World War II Warsaw, Poland, and emigrated to the United States in 1935. Writing in Yiddish, he authored many books, including Gimpel the Fool and In My Father's Court. Saul Bellow was among the translators of Singer's work. In 1978 Singer won the esteemed Nobel Prize for Literature.